I read so voraciously as a child that I have a tendency to think I’ve read everything written for children. But in reality, most of those delightful hours were spent reading and re-reading the books I loved best. Not only are there many children’s classics I’ve never read, there are whole series I’ve never gotten [...]
Archive for the ‘Children's / YA Lit’ Category
To and Again (Freddy Goes to Florida)
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Classics, Fiction on December 5, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Winter’s End
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Speculative Fiction, tagged Review Copy on December 2, 2009 | 7 Comments »
Helen is a teenage orphan, and she needs consoling. She uses one of her three passes for the year to take her friend Milena and visit her consoler, a woman in the town near the boarding school where Helen lives with other orphaned girls. If the two girls do not return in three hours, a classmate [...]
Thursday’s Child
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Fiction, Speculative Fiction on November 30, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Harper Flute and her family live on dry, scrubby grasslands in Australia. Her father never meant to be a farmer, but he took the land the government offered him after World War I, and now he scrapes a living from it by trapping rabbits and selling their pelts. One child after another has stretched the family resources, and [...]
Citizen of the Galaxy
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Fiction, Speculative Fiction on November 23, 2009 | 4 Comments »
I’ll never forget the first time I took a real book suggestion from my father. I was about twelve or thirteen, and he gave me Robert Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel. At the time, I’d never really read any science fiction — my taste tended more to fantasy and endless re-readings of Rebecca. I [...]
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (audio)
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Historical Fiction on November 18, 2009 | 15 Comments »
Nine-year-old Bruno loves living in his five-story house in Berlin, playing with his three best friends for life, and exploring; and he is devastated when his father’s promotion to commandant means that the family must move to “Out-With, ” where the house has only three stories and there are no friends to play with. The only [...]
Saffy’s Angel
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Fiction on November 12, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Children’s books fall, for me, into one of several categories. First, there are the ones where magical children do magical things. These include the Harry Potter series, The Dark is Rising, and the His Dark Materials trilogy: children with special powers using them to special effect. Then you have ordinary children doing magical things. This [...]
The Mysterious Benedict Society
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Fiction on August 7, 2009 | 3 Comments »
ARE YOU A GIFTED CHILD LOOKING FOR SPECIAL OPPORTUNITIES?
In the first few pages of The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart, this is the newspaper advertisement that Reynie Muldoon, an eleven-year-old living in Stonetown Orphanage, decides to answer. When Reynie arrives at the testing site with his pencil in hand, he must pass a [...]
A Great and Terrible Beauty
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Contemporary, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Speculative Fiction on July 1, 2009 | 6 Comments »
In Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty, Gemma Doyle is sixteen in the year 1895. She has spent her life in India, but now that she has reached the age when most young women appear in society, she longs to go to London, and can’t understand why her mother refuses to allow it. Be [...]
Surrender
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Fiction on June 22, 2009 | 5 Comments »
I had never heard of Sonya Hartnett until A Devoted Reader blogged about Hartnett’s novel Of a boy (aka What the Birds See) back in March. What she said sounded so good that I put Hartnett on my TBR list immediately, and when I went, list in hand, to the library, Surrender was the first [...]
The Game
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Fiction, Speculative Fiction on June 14, 2009 | 9 Comments »
I absolutely adore Diana Wynne Jones. As far as I’m concerned, she may be the very best writer of fantasy for children and young adults that there is. Fire and Hemlock stands out as one of my all-time favorite YA books (based on the ballad of Tam Lin), and her Homeward Bounders, Dogsbody, Howl’s Moving [...]
